‘War/Dance’ walks a line of money/hope

Mark Urman, head of ThinkFilm’s U.S. theatrical division, was expecting little more than crudites, turkey wraps and inferior wine when he attended a fundraising party at a neighbor’s house in New Jersey. The event was being held to help finance a documentary called “War/Dance,” about the dispossessed children of Uganda. But Urman was in for a surprise: He found himself both moved and mesmerized by stirring images of resilient African children joyfully dancing and singing to the elegiac high notes of a xylophone. As the 7-minute reel of the then-unfinished film unspooled that spring evening in 2006, Urman realized that he had a strong business prospect before him.

During the small, informal gathering, Urman learned about how in Uganda a 20-year civil war between the brutal, rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and the government had created a dire situation for tens of thousands of children, many of whom were being abducted from their villages and forced to become soldiers or sex slaves. But as the footage showed the children walking among human skulls and living in squalor, it also suggested there was hope, in the guise of a national music contest that was rallying the spirits of these unfortunate innocents. “Singing makes me forget,” said a girl with a beatific voice. “Dancing is like closing my eyes.”

Urman realized that “War/Dance” had everything a powerful film needed: sympathetic characters, unforgettable tragedy and the tension of a potentially uplifting ending. “I did not expect visual polish and artistry from a film funded in a potluck function way,” Urman says. “I mean, it looked like a David Lean movie.” He approached the husband-and-wife directing team, Sean Fine and Andrea Nix, and monopolized their attention in a corner of a room. He soon came to the conclusion that “they were real filmmakers and not missionaries” and eventually agreed to release the film. “As a distributor, I can’t care about the issues,” he says. “But they told me a narrative I could believe in.”

After the successes of documentaries such as the Oscar-winning “Born Into Brothels” (about the children of prostitutes in Calcutta) and “An Inconvenient Truth” (about global warming), film distributors are recognizing that protecting a movie company’s bottom line and following the consciences of well-meaning filmmakers is not necessarily an exclusive endeavor. “War/Dance,” which opened on Friday, hopes to be the latest example of this phenomenon. (“Darfur Now,” a documentary about the war in Sudan, opened strongly with an $8,000 per screen average in three theaters last weekend.)

The film focuses on three young teenagers, Rose, Dominic and Nancy, who have been brutalized by war and now live in the dusty, grim Patongo camp, where 60,000 people reside in huts without electricity or running water. The children retell their worst abuses while staring straight into the camera in almost trance-like states, speaking in a poetic rhythm that is then matched by visuals of grim weather and their starkly lighted selves, sometimes revisiting the locations where the traumas happened.

“It’s almost like time stopped for them. And they went into a dream state. In their interviews, they talk like that,” Fine says. “I mean, a little girl is talking about her parents’ heads being taken out of a pot in front of her, and she’s telling me this story interwoven with impressions of heat coming off of grass and the sound of flies in her ear. That’s what inspired those shots.”

But the children find solace in music and dance. “Before my father died, he told me singing was a great talent,” Rose says. “When I sing, I think of him.”

Although 20,000 Ugandan schools -- mostly from regions less afflicted by the war -- compete to be in the national contest, Patongo surprises the nation by qualifying for the finals. The story follows the daily lives of the children as they go through rehearsals and the camp prepares to make the two-day journey to the contest in the capital city of Kampala.

Fine and Nix, who had worked mostly in television documentaries and are making their feature directorial debut with “War/Dance,” say that their creative process never went impeded by the humanitarian mandate of Shine Global, the nonprofit organization that produced and raised the funds to finance the film. “We come from broadcast,” Nix says. “So, believe me, we know what it means to be compromised. We weren’t.”

In fact, Nix adds, she and her husband very much share the same goals as Albie Hecht and Susan MacLaury, the married couple who started Shine Global with the mandate to make documentaries that combat the exploitation of children. “We want to make an impact. Just by buying a ticket, you are helping to affect change there,” she says, alluding to Shine Global’s nonprofit status, which means any money that the company earns above the costs of the film will find its way to the children of Uganda.

But as a movie distributor, that’s not necessarily talk that Urman likes to hear. “A movie is not a charity,” he says. “People go to movies to be entertained. If you commingle the film with the cause, you will instantly abbreviate the film’s theatrical life.”

However, when informed of Urman’s opinion, Nix remains unrepentant.

“With this movie, both the Mark Urmans and Albie Hechts are getting what they want,” she says.